I went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern today. The show is of his ‘late series’: the centrepiece is the Seagram Murals (i.e. the group of dark Rothkos which have been in the Tate for years, plus some related works that normally live in Japan), but there are also some other groups of works [...]
Posts tagged with ‘art’
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Mood music for the apocalypse
7 October 2008 – 9:30 am
It seems weirdly fitting that the Tate’s two current big exhibitions are Rothko and Bacon. I don’t suppose that the Tate can take any responsibility for the gloomy state of the world’s financial market: I don’t think it’s all because City bankers are popping over in their lunch break and being given the willies.
I wonder, though, [...]
‘Nature’s Engraver’ by Jenny Uglow
22 August 2008 – 3:05 pm
Jenny Uglow wrote the excellent The Lunar Men, about the Lunar Society that included Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton. Nature’s Engraver is a biography of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick who, born in 1753, was just about contemporary with those men. He worked in Newcastle at a time when it was just starting to turn from [...]
Divisionist Painters at the National Gallery
25 July 2008 – 10:47 am
Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910, to give the exhibition its full title. Divisionism is a style of painting where the image is built up of lots of individual brushstrokes of pure colour which, ideally, merge together for the viewer but create a more luminous effect than if the colours were blended on the palette.
If [...]
Links
19 July 2008 – 11:00 pm
» Alphabetized Bible «, 2006, by Tauba Auerbach . See also…
»Alphabetized Bible«, 2006, by Tauba Auerbach.
(del.icio.us tags: art bible )
British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain
16 July 2008 – 11:52 am
The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting is an exhibition of ‘the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930’. So the East here is Cairo, Jerusalem and Constantinople, and not Bombay, Singapore or Nagasaki.
You can hardly touch on the subject without a name-check for one [...]
Cy Twombly at Tate Modern
3 July 2008 – 9:42 pm
I went to the Twombly exhibition at Tate Modern today. What a fabulous name, btw: I tried climbing the Eiffel Tower but the height made me go all twombly.
He’s not someone I knew much about beforehand, and I don’t know how excited I would have been if I had known; he does what you might describe as [...]
The Muybridge Problem
11 June 2008 – 1:22 pm
I was wondering this morning why it is that narrative paintings always seem to fall so flat for a modern viewer (i.e. me). Not just those cheesy C19th paintings with titles like A Soldier Returns; even paintings by artists I find more sympathetic — Rembrandt, Goya, Velazquez — seem very obviously unconvincing when they try to [...]
Links
3 June 2008 – 1:00 pm
Inner city snail - a slow-moving street art project
via Londonist: Art on snails.
(del.icio.us tags: art snails )
Links
30 May 2008 – 8:01 am
BibliOdyssey: Perspectiva
Dancing android skellies!
(del.icio.us tags: C16th Germany art )
Links
25 May 2008 – 9:00 am
Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes: Poems Are Jokes: Dispatches from the Front LINES, It Is a Pun
"It's a dazzling day, the sun is a fiery phoenix, the birds let loose with craps of joy, and the Phelps crazies are here in town to protest. Time to make a damn sign."
(del.icio.us tags: nonsense )
BibliOdyssey: Gothic Illuminated Sketchbook
'manual [...]
Cranach at the Royal Academy
23 April 2008 – 11:27 am
Now this is my kind of exhibition. I don’t what it is I find so appealing about the Northern Renaissance; obviously, artists like Dürer, Van Eyck and Breugel are among the all-time greats of European art, but I love it all: van der Weyden, Memling, Bosch, Holbein, and indeed the star of this show, Lucas Cranach the [...]
Peter Doig & the Camden Town Group at the Tate
21 April 2008 – 2:13 pm
I went to Tate Britain today, mainly to see the Peter Doig, but while I was there I also had a quick look round the Camden Town Group exhibition.
Doig is a contemporary painter, born in Edinburgh in 1959 but brought up in Trinidad and Canada, who went to art school in London and now lives [...]
Coming of Age: American Art 1850-1950
18 April 2008 – 11:03 am
This is a touring exhibition of paintings from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts that is currently at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Though it will be going to Venice and then Fort Lauderdale later in the year, if that’s more convenient for anyone.
I didn’t have hugely high expectations, because the DPG exhibition space [...]
‘From Russia’ at the Royal Academy
26 March 2008 – 5:18 pm
This is a seriously impressive exhibition. The full title is ‘From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg‘. It starts with a little room of Russian paintings from the start of that period; then you get a whole load of French paintings that were collected by two Russian art collectors, [...]
Modernism and politics
25 March 2008 – 10:34 pm
A discussion of modernism and politics starting at Alfred Corn’s, then Baroque in Hackney then George Szirtes here and here.
I suppose we tend to associate modernism with left-wing politics because we feel that people who embrace radical and new aesthetics would probably have radical instincts in politics as well: whatever else modernism was, it [...]
A London particular
10 March 2008 – 1:30 pm
And a peculiarly London sun - against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot - glorified all this by its stare. It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance. The very pavement under Mr Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that [...]
‘Duchamp Man Ray Picabia’ at Tate Modern
7 March 2008 – 7:44 pm
The exhibition is subtitled ‘The Moment Art Changed Forever’ and the poster is illustrated with Duchamp’s Fountain, the famous work that just consists of a urinal signed with the name ‘R. Mutt’. In 2004 Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the C20th, presumably for having sharply and clearly established the principle that art [...]
‘Alexander Rodchenko’ & ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’ at the Hayward
18 February 2008 – 10:01 pm
I went to the Hayward today to see an exhibition of the photography of Alexander Rodchenko; the price of the ticket included entry to a show called ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’, a exhibition which “investigates the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire.”
It was a pleasure to [...]
Medieval ivory at the Courtauld
30 January 2008 – 12:20 pm
The Courtauld Gallery currently has a small but perfectly formed exhibition of medieval ivories.
I do love me some medieval art. And I can really see why someone would collect ivories: they are small but full of character, and I imagine they are beautifully tactile although obviously I didn’t get my hands on the ones in [...]